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Fixing Alt+Tab with Solaris and Citrix

Here's another problem that many users run into, especially when running a full screen Citrix session. Typically when you are in a windows session, alt+tab will cycle the active "Windows" windows. There's a problem when running from a desktop environment where Alt+tab is also recognized to do the same function as is the case with CDE or Gnome.

Let's say you are running a full screen desktop via Citrix and you hit alt+tab, you'd expect that the active "Microsoft" windows would cycle, but what happens is the desktop cycles through the "Solaris" windows that are open.

Note that this doesn't happen under Linux since that ICA client is a tad bit more modern and now has an option to have Citrix capture the whole keyboard. This will be coming in the next major release of the Citrix client for Solaris/SPARC. Also note that this doesn't happen under RDesktop or other RDP clients since they grab the whole keyboard in full screen mode.

Prior to calling the Citrix client (typically wfica in scripted mode), you can simply call the following xmodmap command:

/usr/openwin/bin/xmodmap -e "clear mod1"

This will allow all keystrokes to go right to Windows instead of getting captured by CDE or Gnome.